Weekend long read

“In June 1967 Arab leaders declared their intention to annihilate the Jewish state, and the Jews decided they wouldn’t sit still for it. For the crime of self-preservation, Israel remains a nation unforgiven.

Unforgiven, Israel’s milder critics say, because the Six-Day War, even if justified at the time, does not justify 50 years of occupation. They argue, also, that Israel can rely on its own strength as well as international guarantees to take risks for peace.

This is ahistoric nonsense.”

2) At The Times of Israel, Michael Blum tells the story of Kfar Etzion.

“Today, Israel’s 50-year control over parts of the West Bank and its continuing settlement building are seen by many as major stumbling blocks to peace efforts. But Ben Yaakov, who lives in Kfar Etzion, says the settlement should be seen differently.

He was born there in the early 1940s, in what was not yet a settlement but a kibbutz, the collective communities Jews established even before Israel became a state.

Kfar Etzion was set up on land in an area that was not yet referred to as the West Bank.

Along with others, he fled fighting in late 1947, but returned after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, which lasted from June 5 to 10, 1967.”

“The declaration has come to be remembered as either the moment of conception for Israel (and what the pro-Zionist parliamentarian Richard Crossman called “one of the greatest acts of Western statesmanship in the 20th century”) or the original sin against the Palestinian Arabs (and what the Palestinian scholar-activist Walid Khalidi recently called “the single most destructive political document on the Middle East in the 20th century”). In this sense, the declaration’s centennial is truly “a big deal.” According to various announcements, come November, it will be celebrated by Israel, protested by the Palestinians, and “marked” by Britain.

Few of the celebrants or the protesters, however, will have much understanding of what produced the Balfour Declaration—which should not be surprising. Even historians cannot agree, which assures that almost no one who hasn’t studied the history of it is likely to have a clue.”

4) At the Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig-Gur takes a long and thought-provoking look at the failure of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

“The peace process was forged by a class of individuals possessing an exceptionally well-developed capacity for selective blindness. Some Israeli leaders — Yitzhak Rabin, for instance — believed they could forge with PLO leader Yasser Arafat the sort of cold but dependable standoff Israel had maintained with each Egyptian dictator since Anwar Sadat. Other Israelis — Yossi Beilin is one example — believed they were negotiating a real reconciliation, apparently because they themselves yearned for it so intensely that they could not really fathom that it might not be reciprocated by the other side. Both of these sorts of Israelis were determined to ignore the domestic Palestinian discourse advanced by Arafat and others that resisted reconciliation, elevated the ideological rejection of Israel to the level of civic religion and openly glorified brutality against Israelis — and that was in the happy early years of Oslo peacemaking, the mid-1990s to which more than a few of today’s despairing progressives look for inspiration.”